Nobody goes to a vending machine to feel less alone.

The number one question I get asked about AI is: what is the safest job?

I've been thinking about this for years now. Since a friend told me Anthropic was doing well and the implications of that started sinking in. That was 2022, my answer hasn't changed since the first time I really thought it all the way through.

People expect a clever answer. They want you to say prompt engineer or AI safety researcher or something that sounds like it belongs on a conference stage. I feel like people always want something optimistic. I've noticed that people want to feel like the future has a place for them if they just learn the right skill.

But that's not where I landed.

I landed on bartender.

Start with AI on its own. It handles the cognitive work. Writing, analysis, coding, strategy, diagnosis, all of it, the whole kit and kaboodle... or at least enough of it that the number of humans needed to do it drops dramatically. That takes out most of white-collar knowledge work. Not all at once, but it happens.

Okay, so people say, go into the trades! Become a plumber. Become an electrician! AI can't snake a drain!

But AI doesn't exist in isolation anymore. Combine it with robotics and now you've got the physical side covered too. Manufacturing, construction, warehousing, surgery, driving. The timeline is longer but the destination is the same. The "learn to code" crowd and the "become a plumber" crowd both lose the same game on different schedules.

So play it out. AI handles thinking. Robots handle doing. What's left?

What's left is the thing that neither can replace even in combination: one human being showing up for another one.

There are a lot of jobs built on human presence. Therapy. Clergy. Caregiving. Social work. All valid. All probably pretty safe. But ask a more specific question:

Where does the average person... not someone in a support group, not someone with a therapist on speed dial, just a regular person feeling low and disconnected, where do they actually go?

They go to one place. They sit at a thing. They pay for a thing. And what comes with it is free.

They go to a bar. They sit on a stool. They buy a drink. And the conversation, the human connection, the being seen by another person... that comes free.

No appointment. No referral. No insurance. No copay. No waitlist. No stigma. You don't even have to admit anything is wrong. Nobody says "I'm going to the bar because I'm lonely." They say "I'm grabbing a drink." It's a side door into human connection that requires nothing from you except showing up and ordering.

That's what makes it different from therapy. Therapy requires you to acknowledge the problem. The bar lets you fix it without ever naming it.

And here's the thing: a robot could pour a drink. The "liquid in glass problem" is mechanically trivial. The drink is the excuse. It's the socially acceptable reason to sit in a room with another human being. Take away the person behind the bar and you've destroyed the entire value proposition. You've turned it into a vending machine. Nobody goes to a vending machine to feel less alone.

Now, you might push back. What about economic collapse? If mass unemployment actually arrives, do people still have money to sit at bars?

History answers this one:

Taverns in ancient Rome were everywhere... so essential to daily life that emperors tried and failed to regulate them. Through the fall of Rome, through the Dark Ages, through the Black Death killing a third of Europe, the tavern survived. In medieval villages the alehouse was often the only public gathering place that existed.

The Great Depression. People lost everything. Entire industries vanished. And bars still did business. One of the most popular things FDR ever did was end Prohibition. The country was broke and starving and one of the government's first moves was to make it easier to get a drink and sit with someone.

Frankly, prohibition itself might be the strongest evidence of all. The government literally made it illegal. Made the entire product a crime. And people built an entire underground economy to keep going. Speakeasies thrived. You could outlaw the thing and people still found their way to a bar stool.

Wars, famines, plagues, revolutions, depressions. Through every single catastrophe in recorded human history, the person pouring drinks and listening never went away. People found the money. They always have. The job survived things far worse than AI.

The WHO says one in six people worldwide is affected by loneliness. Linked to an estimated 100 deaths every hour: over 871,000 annually. In the US, one in three adults reports feeling lonely. One in four says they have no social or emotional support at all. The Surgeon General declared it a public health epidemic.

The health numbers are wild. A meta-analysis covering 300,000 people found that strong social connection increases your odds of survival by 50 percent. Loneliness increases the risk of premature death by about 26 percent, comparable, the research says, to smoking 15 cigarettes a day.... More dangerous than obesity. More dangerous than not exercising. More dangerous than air pollution.

Young people are getting crushed. Ages 15 to 24 reported a 70 percent drop in time spent with friends. Half of young workers say they feel lonely and emotionally distant from coworkers. Social media use over two hours a day more than doubles the odds of feeling socially isolated. Remote work is accelerating all of it.

And then there's Ray Oldenburg, the sociologist who spent decades studying what he called the "third place." Not home, not work, but the informal gathering spots in between. Bars, cafés, barbershops. He found that the third place is, typically, some kind of watering hole, and conversation is the main activity. Beverages, he wrote, become "veritable social sacraments." Regions that had taverns were better off economically than regions that didn't. His work kept going after his death — his co-author argued that third places are the answer to loneliness, political polarization, and community resilience.

Every line of research points the same direction. Loneliness is the defining health crisis of our era. It's getting worse. Technology is accelerating it. And the primary informal intervention humanity has used across every culture and every century is a person behind a bar.

The ironies:

The first: the product enabling the connection: alcohol, is itself a depressant. It often makes the underlying problem worse. The safest job in the AI economy is partly sustained by a cycle that deepens the loneliness driving demand for it.

The second is more structural: AI doesn't just fail to replace the bartender. It actively creates more demand for one. Every job it automates removes a daily human touchpoint. Every office it empties, every cashier it replaces, every call center it handles, each one is a small subtraction from the number of people a person talks to in a day. AI deepens the isolation. And the isolation is what makes the bartender more essential than ever.

So that's where I land!

The safest job in the age of AI isn't the most technical or the most credentialed. It's not the one that requires the most intelligence or education or capital. It's the oldest therapist in the world. The person who pours a drink and listens. Who knows your name, asks how you're doing, and... without an appointment!! without making you admit what you actually came in for... makes you feel a little less alone for an hour....

AI will handle the thinking. Robots will handle the doing. But the bartender will still be there. The bar stool will be the last seat filled by someone looking for something no machine can give them.

With love as always,

j.